Filed under: Reviews
Shiri Mordechay photographed by Jeffrey Sturges for New Yorker
The gallery talk at Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin this weekend offered visitors a chance to listen to New York based artist, Shiri Mordechay. Shiris’ multimedia, multi-dimensional works on paper are absolutely enthralling and demand plenty of time for you to truly catch every irreverent detail. Mordechay plays with scale, drawing 4 feet tall horses and making them follow a line that ends in tiny, quarter inch collaged photographs of horses. During the gallery talk, Mordechay was reserved, obtuse and oftentimes just at a loss for words in regards to the sexual overtones and possible epic narrative underlying all her work. In this instance, Mordechay makes sense in that the works are so saturated, she shouldn’t have to say too much about their mysterious origins. Arthouse Director Sue Graze asked thoughtful, provocative questions for both Shiri Mordechay and video/sculptor Lauren Kelly and created a true dialog between the artists and the viewers.
Lauren Kelly’s video of Edenic, verdant utopias headed for destruction and doom offered viewers a close up view of a faux French garden. Flocked toy animals sit silently while a French narrator reads a poem a bit incongruent with the white subtitles. Lauren seemed slightly nervous, but thoroughly explained her continuous curiosity for all things utopic as they exist in the shadows of real events such as Hurricane Ike. Along the way, she manages to evoke some giggles with stop motion animation that makes a rabbit flick its felt tongue over and over for a few seconds. Truly absurdist, delightful work that I highly recommend if you’re rolling around Austin. The entire show, “Rapture & Rupture”, was curated by Elizabeth Dunbar and will be on view through January 11th. {Congratulations to Elizabeth on her new baby, just born on the very bright morning of our Gallery Talk! }
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Some artists have specific ideas in mind when they deliberately decide to use certain symbols, while others create in a way that is more spontaneous and less understandable. Mordechay seems to fall into the latter category and so her common reply of “I don’t know” at the Q & A felt really honest and not like some sort of a cop-out, though it did create some awkward moments…
Comment by ian November 18, 2008 @ 10:15 pm